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Comment by NateEag

6 hours ago

Yes, we do, and the only sane strategy for dealing with a capricious genie is "Don't."

How do you prove the alignment problem is solved?

That's the neat thing. You can't.

It's directly equivalent to asking this question of a human:

"How do I know this human I'm talking with now really is a nice person, and isn't just pretending to be nice to take advantage of me in future?"

In short you can't ever really prove it. You can only be careful and judge on past behavior, and expand trust carefully. As for humans, so for AI.

  • Close; at least with a machine you can poke around inside the activations and see what it's thinking. Closest with a human is an fMRI (which is much lower resolution, though to me still bordering on the miraculous) or an implant (each chip is limited a very small number of cells, and in general they can only be put in certain parts of the brain).

    On the other hand, there's a more fundamental problem is we don't really know what "nice" even means, and even with machines whose inner states we can see relatively easily, we don't know how to interpret those inner states well enough to tell if we're looking at superficial or deep motivations, the difference between "be nice today" and actually being motivated about your best interest.